Having A Baby With Two Mums – Practical Positives

Nearly two weeks ago, while my daughter was still in hospital, I wrote a post about her birth and my experience of it as a lesbian non-birth mother. That post was read by far more people than I expected, and I’m still replying to people who’re responding to it.
I wrote it because I had to find a way to process what had happened, and because I felt very strongly that it was important to talk about an experience I’d not seen talked about elsewhere – what it’s like to be a lesbian mother (especially, a lesbian non-birth mother) in a busy hospital. I wasn’t sure what reaction to expect.

A few – very few – people did respond the way I’d worried they would, reading no further than the first few sentences and insisting ‘oh, I’m sure it’s just the same for fathers!’. But far more people got in touch to offer support and to make sure we knew that what happened with us wasn’t and shouldn’t be the norm. I’ve been absolutely amazed and impressed by midwives and doctors and nurses who’ve never met me or my partner or my baby, and who still wanted to reassure us. Amazing feminist friends – of both of ours – made sure we felt looked after.

Elisabeth is three weeks old today. She doesn’t (thank goodness) have meningitis, and she came home from hospital after some absolutely amazing, dedicated treatment on a ward that treats newborn babies like her. She has been losing a lot of weight, and we’ve had a slightly grim couple of weeks where we’ve had to wake her every 2.5 hours to feed her specified amounts of breastmilk, expressed breastmilk and formula – over a period of an hour or two, during which she would typically return said milk to us with additional gifts of stomach acid and horrified cries – according to what each midwife or health visitor hoped would keep us from going back into hospital. But, as of yesterday, she has stopped losing weight, is gaining weight and – best of all – we don’t have to wake her any more when she’s sound asleep in order to feed her! Hallelujah. We’re even enjoying her screaming!

In this post, I want to talk about the really lovely things that happened. That starts with the ward that got Elisabeth out of hospital. The huge difference here was consistency – and that’s a NHS funding issue. Instead of constantly being told one thing by one person only to have another one rush in to say something different, there were high enough staffing levels that we could be given a plan. I couldn’t stay overnight on this ward, but was encouraged to be there for all of the visiting hours. Everyone made clear that the parents’ room was intended for me as well as for Emma – in fact, they seemed surprised I’d ask. We had some brilliant support here, and especially from a hugely compassionate woman who immediately understood how to reassure Emma and how to encourage her with establishing breastfeeding, and who took the time to put us at ease by acknowledging we were a lesbian couple and casually mentioning that her mother was also married to a woman, and asking us whether the baby’s dark hair came from the donor, or because Emma carried a baby conceived from one of my eggs.

Some people, I know, seem to think this approach would be unwelcome. A lot of people act as if it’s almost rude to talk about the elephant in the room, the fact that here are two women having a baby. I’ve had quite funny conversations with people in the past, who practically walk into the conversation with a flashing light saying must not mention the sperm donor! over their heads. Of course, some people probably don’t want to talk about this stuff. But, in my limited and partial experience, more people do. Going to a fertility clinic can be a sad experience for heterosexual couples – the system is geared up to deal very gently and sensitively with people who have gone through loss and disappointment, people who may have just learned they can never have a child in the way they always expected they could, and people whose identities within their relationships are under profound stress. Awareness that fertility treatment itself might very well not provide any help, hangs unspoken over every conversation. For us, obviously, it was different. Deciding to have a child and picking a clinic felt rather exciting, and sitting in the waiting room looking at images of newborns felt positively romantic. So, we were glad when people – including the lovely midwives on the induction ward at the hospital – felt able to chat to us about this. If you think about it, it’s a variation on the normal chatter everyone enjoys around a baby. Does he have your hair? Will she have your chin? Do you think he’ll be tall like you? These are nice questions, and I’m glad the people who asked them felt able to do that.

After the hospital, another lovely experience was seeing the registrar when we registered Elisabeth’s birth. We turned up expecting to have to wade through reams of paperwork and acres of documentation we’d brought, but in the event we were in and out in a few minutes, with only the basic necessities noted – and the registrar was very excited as we were the first female couple she’d registered under the new law that allows us both to be parents. This brings me on to what I wanted to set out for people reading this post. When we registered Elisabeth, we both got to be on her birth certificate, because we are both her parents. And this is something that many people don’t know you can do. Here are the legal facts (bizarre and delightful as they are):

• If you are a lesbian couple and married (or, even if you’re a heterosexual couple and married), a child born within the marriage is presumed to be the child of both spouses, unless established otherwise. This delightfully eighteenth-century sounding law still holds.
• If you are (like us) neither married nor in a civil partnership, you can still put both names on the birth certificate, like an unmarried heterosexual couple. You must be treated at a registered clinic and you must use sperm from a registered donor bank, and you must fill in paperwork to acknowledge that you plan to be co-parents.
• If you do this, your child will be able to trace his or her sperm donor aged 18. The donor is entitled to refuse, but our clinic (like most clinics) provides a statement from the donor. Our donor left a really nice message explaining that he had donated because his wife had difficulty conceiving (you can do this to offset costs), and saying that family was important to him. We could relate to this and thought our daughter would appreciate understanding his perspective.

The legal side of things is surprisingly easy, but not very well known – a lot of people have told me I’m not the baby’s legal mother, or have been concerned I (or Emma) would not have legal rights. But it’s amazing to me how quickly laws have changed. For all of the time I was in school, Section 28 – the law that made it illegal for schools to promote (or, in practice, discuss) ‘pretended’ family relationships between two women – was in force. That law was only repealed in England in 2003, when I was 19 and Emma was 22. Such a lot has changed since then. More will change. This isn’t a typical ‘Easter’ post, but for us it feels appropriately like a new beginning.

Tiffany Dufu’s ‘Drop the Ball’: Women Blaming Themselves, Again

A quick post, in irritation. Today, I read in the Guardian that women should expect more of their partners, and less of themselves. Not terrible advice (though not really a revelation either). The article is a puff piece for a book I never plan to buy, written by new mother and bringer of epiphanies to the oblivious, Tiffany Dufu. In her book, so we are told, Dufu describes her revelatory experience navigating the return to work after her first child’s birth, and her growing realisation that her partner would have to do some of the work around the home, since they both had full time jobs. The experience that brought on this revelation sounds depressingly familiar. Back from a full day of work, while struggling with breastfeeding difficulties, Dufu heard her husband return home to the meal she had prepared, past the dry-cleaning she had picked up, only to dump his dirty plates in the sink for her to clean.

I sympathise with Dufu. As I have sympathised with, quite literally, dozens of friends who’ve talked about variations on this theme. It’s the subject of Susan Maushart’s brilliantly incisive, well-researched book Wifework, which discusses the imbalances of male-female work around the home, backed up with some interesting statistics and studies. But, where Maushart mostly analyses and uncovers, Dufu – or, at least, the author of her puff piece – falls back on a cloyingly upbeat set of conclusions. Women who work too much around the home – conditioned, by their upbringing, into ‘Stepford wives’ (I really wish this term would die a death, incidentally) – should take lessons from (who else?) their husbands. Apparently, once called upon to act, Dufu’s husband turned out to be practically a domestic superman, marshalling children to school in perfect order and discovering clever short-cuts to domestic work Dufu had never found out. The article confides:

‘One of the big lessons she learned was that when you drop a ball and your partner picks it up, you have to let him pick it up his way.’

In Dufu’s case, this meant letting her partner cook the same meal for a week, which doesn’t sound terribly like picking up the ball to me. It sounds more like fucking up. And fucking up is, of course, occasionally absolutely fine. We should probably all be better at doing a half-arsed job and cutting ourselves a break for it. But let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as, well, not fucking up. Shall we? Because one imagines that, in the end, eating the same meal for a week is actually not a great thing.

I’m irritated by this article, not because I don’t recognise that both it and the book it promotes, speak to a genuinely hard choice a lot of women face: the pinch between social pressure to be superwoman and the knowledge that their partner (whether deliberately or obliviously, whether through lack of ability or firm belief in the triviality of domestic tasks) will only step up to do a fraction of the work that is needed. I’m irritated because this revelation is still presented as something women need to learn – and moreover, something women need to learn from men.

Dufu refers to what she was struggling with as ‘home control disease,’ as if the problem in her life were a virulent organism poisoning her, from which her saintly husband saved her, with his panacea of half-arsed domestic help. It would be nice to think that, every now and again, we could look back to our feminist foremothers, who diagnosed a very different disease, and prescribed a very different solution, which didn’t involve requiring women to blame themselves for the pressures on them.

Women’s Strategies of Memory: Representations in Literature and Art (CFP)

I’ll be blogging and talking more about this over the coming months, but I’m really excited to be able to share a project I’ve been working on with the brilliant Dr Emma Bérat. We’re both interested in gender and memory, and so we (and by we, I mean, mostly her, while I was an enthusiastic and eager sidekick/cheerleader for our project) have drafted a proposal for a couple of sessions of papers for Leeds IMC in 2018. If you’re interested, have a look below – and please share the CFP far and wide, as we’re really hoping to bring together a diverse group of scholars, and especially to interest people working beyond our own specific disciplines.

Here you go!

Call for Papers for panel(s) proposal at Leeds IMC 2018, 2-5 July

Memory, in the middle ages as now, was widely accessible to women as means of personal and political influence. Scholarship on the strategic and technical employment of memory in the middle ages has principally explored men’s practices. This panel focuses on representations of medieval women’s deliberate and strategic uses of memory in literature, art, and historical narrative.

We invite papers from any discipline, region and medieval period, which consider any aspect of the representation of women’s memory. We are particularly interested in women who perform remembering, forgetting, or recounting past events as a means of public or political power; and who manipulate histories or identities to construct or reconstruct the past, or to influence the memories of other characters. We also hope to explore women’s less conscious strategies of memory, such as forgetting as a way of compartmentalising traumatic emotions. Reexaminations of women who are accused (by other characters or the narrator) of errors of memory, such as forgetting, deliberate ignorance or manipulation of record, are also welcome.

Please contact Lucy Allen (lucyallen505@gmail.com) and Emma Bérat (eoloughl@uni-bonn.de) with an abstract of approximately 100 words and a brief biography by 30 July 2017.